HOWLERS IN FICTION

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 60, 12 March 1927, Page 21

HOWLERS IN FICTION

(By"Ajax.")

The gap which was left in Engjish journalism by the disappearance last year of tho "Weekly Westminster " ■with its unique "Problems and Prizes" page has been partly filled by the (»inpetitions of tho "Saturday Reviaw" and the "Observer." Neither of tliese papers has yet given the space to these literary competitions, or disrilayed the fertility of invention in thesetting of questions, or attracted -week by week the answers from many of the best scholars of England, which for more than twenty years after made the ''Problems and Prizes" page in the "Saturday Westminster Gazette" and its successor well worth the modest price of the whole paper. Sometimes, indeed, even the English text of ,' the. passage set for translation into La.tin or Greek was alone worth more tthan that price. I shall never forget deciding towards the close of the War: to drop the "Saturday Westminster ffazette," and coming immediately afterwards on the following linea which/ its problems editor had set for translation into Latin elegiacs:— ,

EPITAPH ON AN ARMY OF j MERCENARIES. i Those in the day when heaven was falling, • i .The hour when earth's foundations i flea, i 1 Followed their mercenary calling ! And took their wages and are doad. . ; Their shoulders held the sky suspended; ■ | : They stood, and earth 'a foundations stay; {What God abandoned, these defended, , And saved the sun' of things for „' pay. • / . —A. E. Housmanw For the third anniversary of the Battle of Ypres, Professor Housman had honoured the memory of the Old Contemptiblea in what is perhaps ifche finest of war poems. I had missed i;he lines when they appeared in ttie "Times" of 31st October, 1917, brat about three months later the "Satierday Westminster Gazette" put me Tight. No thought of cancelling My subscription after thatl On the contrary, I kept it going till the end of Jhe paper's career, and afterwards treatted the successor in the same way. "Howlers in Fiction" was the asttractive subject of a December competition in the "Observer." Two of tho best examples were supplied by tha examiner himself in- his explanation otf Jhe kind of thing he wanted. In a recent lecture, he wrote, Dean • \lnge, discussing recent novels, saM that "in one a youug lady, deserilW ing the University boat race, saM that 'of all the crew none of them rowed a faster stroke than sixjll whilst another novelist described a,

■woman-hater as a 'gyroscope.' " The lady novelist seetns to be prolifta of these things when she wanders into Jhe region of sport. I The female nrind, says Mr. A. I>,, Godley, in the .volume of ' ' Reliquiae, *" recently published by the Oxford Press, appears, when it travels beyonid the field of actual observation, jam free its imagination from the tyranny-' of mere truth to nature. It was a. woman who wrote the wonderfmit chapter in "Strathmore," about ■which critics have never been quite certain whether the incident deseritoted was the Liverpool Grand Nationail or the Boat Eace. It was a woma»m who described tho "To Triumphed echoing up the vine-clad slopes of tbi© Acropolis. ■

In addition to Dean Inge's tw<> feamples the recent blunder of one cii' the greatest of English novelists may. be taken'to have been barred as too notorious. In "The Janeites"—tbap story of a Jane Austen Club at th*> front which is included in his "Dobilw and Credits"—rMr. Kipling writes tHti follows of the welcome given to Miaii Ansten by some of her distinguisheicl predecessors:— ■-.. Jane went to Paradise: \ That was only fair. Good Sir Walter met her first, : And led her up the stair. Henry and Tobias, And Miguel of Spain, Stood with Shakespeare at the top To welcome Jane. !As Jane Austen went to Paradise in 1817, and Sir Walter Scott remained c»n this planet till 1832, it can only ha-re .been his astral body that led her up the stair. A blunder of fifteen yearns in the chronology of writers so enrtnent and so near to our own day is a good-sized one, but Mr. Kipling is bjig enough to stand it. ; From the excellent anthology of novelists' blunders compiled by the "Observer's" competitors I make tho following selection:— ;

Her beautiful face was palest ivoryj; not a spot of rose in it anywhere, savo the lips and the blue eyes.—(Arnolfl Bennett: "Lord Raingo.") In "The End of the House ejE Alard," Miss Sheila Kaye-Smith tefife us that Jenny Alard remembered a took called "With Wallace at BaaBockburn." Henry VIII. was called "Defend«r of the Faith" because he defended th»e Church of England against the Pope.-— (Marie Corelli: "The Master Christian. ") | Yes. I should have been supporting myself before, not h-nging on at CanjIridge costing such a lot and doinjg nothing but stroke the eleven smd.play rugger.—(E. W. Savi: "The AcM .Test.") In Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend," Bella Eokesmith had already informed her husband of a certain pending event: "The earth moved round thie sun a certain number of times" and brought a baby Bella home. All the docks in London were strifeing ten minutes before nine.—(Jule» Verne: "Around the World in Eighty Days.") ' The paradoxical pleasure that h« felt in this was comparable, perhapis, to the emotion which prompted Charkis the Second to a meticulous toilet on thie morning of his execution.—(A. Hamilton Gibbs: "Labels.") "Of course, he wanted Daphne in the bows, facing him, while he scullS?" '. ;,', (Maua Diyer» "Coombe St. Mary's"). ; Who should come whistling down thie street, with a cigar in his mouth, but his new friend, Undy Scott.—(Anthony Trollope: "The Three Clerks.") All Muggleton had notched somte fifty-four while the score of the Dinmley Dellers was as blank as their faces (i.e., Dingley Dell actually failed bo score before they had an innings.) (Charles Dickens: "Pickwick Papers.") If I had been judging I should probably have fallen a victim to that biswitehing spot of rose in the blue eyas of Mr. Arnold' Bennett's heroine But the claims of the man who had wasted his time and his money at Cambridge in stroking tho eleven and of the other oarsman who wanted to have Daphme in the bows so that she might face him while ho sculled would have run Mfc Bennett's lady very close. The "Observer's" critic, however, cared fw none of these things. His award went to the more than ambidextrous gentlleffiaa Ffio performed as follows in jp!

Phillips Openheim's "False Evidence":— We rolled over and over in a fierce embrace, his teeth almost meeting in my hand, which held him by .the throat. The title of the novel is not badly chosen if this is a fair sample. . . . An apology is due for allowing an unchecked recollection of a phrase of Tennyson's to appear in my last notes inside quotation marks, and for the aggravation of the error by a misprint. In "The Brook" the line beginning "And breath in converse-seasons" was amended by the striking out of "converse seasons" as "too sibilant in sound" and the substitution of "Aprilautumns. I hate sibilation in verse, said the poet to his son. Always kick the hissing geese if you can out of the boat. Tennyson had set his face against excessive sibilation from the first if such a sibilant sentence is permissible even in prose. It is recorded in his biography that, after quoting from "The Rape of the Lock"—

( What dire offence from amorous causes springs 1 What mighty contests arise from trivial things! He said: "Amrus causiz springs," horrible! I would sooner die than write such a line!! Archbishop Trench (not then archbishop) was the only critic who said of my first volume, "what a singular absence of the 's'l" Yet Tennyson allowed '"converse seasons" to appear more than thirty years later, and when he afterwards cut it out was driven to adopt what seems to me a feetle substitute. It may be better for a poet to hiss than to limp